reINspiration

In his article, Whitman’s Live Oak with Moss, Alan Helms discusses a sequence of twelve poems Whitman wrote ‘short time’ before 1859, when he copied them in a notebook under the title Live Oak with Moss. The sequence was first discovered, as Helms says, ‘almost forty years ago’ by Fredson Bowers who published it in Studies in Bibliography, and later in Whitman’s Manuscripts: Leaves of Grass (1860). The Live Oak with Moss sequence tells the story about love affair with a man, and in Helms opinion, testifies of the painful process of coming out. Helms goes even further to identify the lover in the poems as Fred Vaughan, a young man who lived with Whitman in late 1850s, but fails to produce any kind of evidence to support his speculation.

Since Bowers ‘findings’ were published the sequence was mainly neglected by both, scholars and teachers and Helms believes that this was mostly done due to the subject matter of the poems, that is homosexual affair. Also, the fact that these poems as a sequence were never published by Whitman himself, led Helms into introducing the theme of ‘homophobic oppression’ as the main theme of the entire sequence. That Whitman later shuffled and dispersed the poems from the Live Oak with Moss among the poems of the Calamus cluster, and published them all together in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass served as a proof to support his idea that Whitman was aware of cultural taboos and that he was, in a way ashamed of himself. Author further claims that Whitman’s awareness of the dangers lurking those like him in that homophobic society, even managed to silence him in a way, since he never published the sequence on its own, nor  did he ever returned to the topic after the third edition of the Leaves.

Good portion of Helms’s article was devoted to the analysis of the actual poems of this sequence which he identified as poems from the Calamus cluster in the following order:  14, 20, 11, 23, 8, 32, 10, 9, 34, 43, 36 and 42 and which he provided at the end of his article in the mentioned order. Then he identified a kind of key words, in his opinion, of the entire sequence: confusion, pain and fear. He continued with the analysis of every poem, mostly in terms of ‘transgression – retreat’ revealing Whitman as an oppressed victim, ashamed and silenced.

However, in addition to the content, Helms addresses Whitman’s style in Live Oak with Moss poems. Since the poems are written in a kind of sonnet form, that Helms compares to Shakespear, he sees it as a kind of of compensation; the more Whitman transgressed the more he turned to ‘conventionally approved forms’ and that had a negative impact on Whitman’s style.  Moreover, this deterioration of style, Helms disucsses, could be the result of the subject matter (homosexual love), and the difficulties Whitman might have experienced trying to come up with an appropriate vocabulary. According to Helms, the existing vocabulary did not allow Whitman to express himself without feeling shame.

The article end in the repeated idea of ‘homosexual oppression’ and the bleak and gloomy atmosphere of the Live Oak with Moss sequence is re-established.

Now, even though Helms’s critique of the sequence in question has its downsides, there are some aspects of it that can be very useful for us. Even though I am not so receptive of such a negative undercurrent in these poems, the confusion and fear and pain are, without any doubt, present in some of the poems and in our analyses it will serve us well to be aware of the inner conflicts of the author and consequent pain he feels. Also, the fact that Whitman obviously had his share of doubts about the publication of the  Live Oak with Moss sequence leaves us a lot of room for new, bold (why not) interpretations concerning the state of the I in these poems. Still, the thing I believe will probably be the most helpful is Helms’s idea about (in)appropriacy of the language that was available to Whitman for the images and experiences he wanted to describe. In other words, if we consider not only what is said, but also what is not said and what was made ambiguous for some reasons, new, fresh interpretations just might start pouring out.